Cold Yet Feeling
This is it. It's all down to me. Some may say that I'm cold, hard, and unfeeling, but I care what happens to my people and I will do everything I can to protect them. I feel her fingers, sweaty and shaking, wrapped around me. I will keep her safe. She has caressed me through long nights. She cared for me before herself. On particularly hard days, when the enemy crafts fly low and the fear is almost too much to bear, she has put me in her mouth and dares me to go off on her, but I never will. We have a bond, she and I, one forged somewhere in between my rescue and her stowing away on Alpha IX's starship and crash-landing into the Hel-forsaken place in the middle of the third Yarmouth Conflict. Well, the Reunion calls to them as conflicts. The resistance simply refers to it as a slaughter. And it is. Pure, unadulterated genocide. I should know. I was there for the first one. I made more than my fair share bodies out of unresistant citizens. But then I was retired. Too old for battle, they said, takes too long to get me going. So they scrapped me. I would probably still be on that scrap heap too, if not for a curious, toddling little thing with a dirty face and a dress made of resistance banners. She scooped me out of the trash and brought me home to her Minders, who were appropriately aghast. But she kept me, nevertheless. There star can that was safe from her aim, she was proud and I was proud. We were a team; I was useful again--and when the recruiters came and her Minders told her she was too young for this war she would have none of it. She snuck aboard the Alpha. Her Minders were right. She is far too young for this war. She jumps at noises, she cries in the dark, and she clutches too tightly to me in the heat of battle. I have felt the touch of many hands, but hers are the first I want to linger, to live beyond the soot filled mornings and the sounds of the Reunion's star fleet firing on nearby camps. She saved me once, and I want nothing more than to save her. I fear she has joined the wrong side. Despite the connection I feel to her and my admitted joy at being useful to her, I wish she would abandon me and run. Run far away from this conflict, back to her Minders on Thrax, back to that scrap heap and leave me there. But it is not to be. A voice startles her and she turns, thrusting me outwards. I shake in her hands, my target moving. I can feel the power building, but it is too late. Her fingers are too slow. No. It is I that is too slow. They were right to retire me after all—the newer models the Reunion carry are much faster than I. The world tilts as we hit the ground hard. I have failed. I tumble from her hands, my charge finally ready, never to be fired by her delicate fingers. As I lay in the cooling red pool beside her, her gasps of air sounding shallow and wet, I have never wished more that I could fire on my own.